Category: Blog Post

Brief Encounter, 1945. Directed by David Lean and written by Noel Coward. Starring Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard.

Available at your public library.

Sometimes it helps to escape a blue weekend with a mindless comedy, some blood and gore, or a spectacular adventure full of explosions. To wander into the local Cineplex with twenty bucks, grab your ticket, and check out from life for two hours. Look around you: every theater has its share of time-wasters, a brief moment in the darkness to distract you from the weight of the world. Sometimes, that is what movies are for.

Then again, sometimes it is good to give in, to allow some subtle little movie, a forgotten gem that you’ll have to rent and drink cheap wine with, a piece of brutal honesty from a group of caring people, to worm its way into your heart and shake you to your core. Despite the pain, and perhaps the sleeplessness (definitely the sleeplessness), this is often a good thing. A perfect example: Brief Encounter.

This is a simple film, about nothing more that two very good, very married people falling in love, deeply and passionately. It is from the hand of David Lean, notable for such Technicolor classics as Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia, films that don’t have as much human emotion in their seven hours as this one does in one frame. Most likely it couldn’t have been made at any time other than 1945, and it couldn’t have been set anywhere but London. Part of its considerable tension lies in an old, British, don’t-rock-the-boat morality that was commonplace back then, when it was enough to make certain that your husband was well fed or your wife could get her cooking done in new pots and pans. Admire it for its deep respect of every character and the way it treats their feelings with utmost care. And then lay on your couch afterwards, close your eyes, and just stare out into dark space and feel for a moment. You’re alive.

Brief Encounter is the story of a nice woman, Laura Jesson, who gets an ash caught in her eye one afternoon while waiting for a train. Laura is played by Celia Johnson, and she is an absolute beauty: an actress of great emotional range who was willing to look ugly, willing to be silly and laugh like a donkey, but a woman who transforms herself into a swan at a simple glance–utterly magnificent. Every Thursday Laura retreats to town from the suburbs to buy groceries, check out a book, eat lunch, and watch a movie before returning home to pleasant domesticity. When she is stricken by the ash, the plain Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), a family practitioner, politely offers his assistance, and plucks the mote from her eye. With that, they bid one another adieu. But the next Thursday he runs into her outside the chemist’s shop. Later that same day, in a crowded restaurant, she sees the poor doctor looking for an empty seat: she offers him the last seat at her table. Easily, they drift into laughter, noticing a woman who abuses her cello, later chuckling over Donald Duck in a smoky theater. “Let’s do this again!” the doctor pleads, having had more fun than he’s enjoyed in God knows how long. The following week, they eat lunch again, and then, suddenly, without their knowing it (or even wanting it), they find that the hours of walking, of sharing observations of their staid world, after leaning forward hungrily during tea and discussing ideas they could never quite articulate in the past, they are in love. At one point, as Alec is talking, Laura is startled: he looks, to her, as energetic and beautiful as a small boy. It delights her. She doesn’t know why, only that it does, and with this enchantment, she is also quite terrified.

She tries the usual tactic, talking about the doctor to her husband, hoping that this collision between the two worlds will jar her into a sense of duty, will kill this growing and uncontrollable feeling. And where it might have in the past, perhaps, this tactic utterly fails: she sees Alec again, and they have no choice but to be lovers.

The film ends badly, cruelly. Brief Encounter seems, at times, to almost revel in the brutal emotional destruction of two kind and polite people. Their final meeting is thwarted by a local busybody, and as Alec leaves, forever from her life, all he can do is place a hand gently on her shoulder, unable even to kiss her good-bye, a kiss that every moviegoer longs for as much as Laura. Unable to stand the pain, she thinks to commit suicide by jumping in front of a train, but cannot. She has children, after all. Thank God for the children. What do we do if there are no children?

That this minor masterpiece is narrated by Laura, trying to explain her actions (in her head–not out loud) to her crossword-loving husband, makes it all the more difficult to watch. Both people are surrounded by the innocent, and Lean and screenwriter Coward have no intention of marginalizing the families of the lovers. This is a film about a force of nature, as every bit dangerous as a hurricane, nearly as deadly. This couple knows better, but they also know that the moments together were some of the best they have ever known. This affair has honed their souls and made them diamond-bright. They cannot, under any circumstances, give that up. It will define their lives.

As the train carries Laura away from Alec forever, she thinks–

This misery cannot last.
Nothing lasts really,
Neither happiness or despair.
Not even life lasts very long…

Do not forget: It is because of that last line that her love for this man is so important, no matter the cost.

Watch this film if you can, when your heart is sore and you feel silly and stupid and frustrated all the time for the things you want but worry you cannot have. The film is cathartic, to a degree: of course, nothing ever really works to salve melancholy and shame. Think then, as you witness the torment that confronts Alec and Laura, that these clandestine meetings actually push them towards a spectacular grace. Be grateful, to whatever god you worship, for the blessed relentlessness of emotions. For even guilt, as James Dickey once wrote, is magical.

Detroit Tigers 8, New York Yankees 3. Detroit wins ALDS three games to one.

Trust me, I understand your pain. But today, after nearly twenty years, New York City is Mudville and Detroit celebrates. Briefly, for of course it ain’t over ’til it’s over.

The Departed and Last King of Scotland.

The Departed, 2006. Directed by Martin Scorsese, written by William Monahan. Starring Leonardo, Jack, Matt, Marky-Mark, Charlie Sheen’s Dad, Ray Winstone, one of the Baldwin brothers, Anthony Anderson, Kevin Corrigan, and the winsome Vera Farmiga.

Now showing pretty much everywhere.

Having failed to garner much in the way of Oscar glory with Gangs of New York and The Aviator, M. Scorsese has turned his camera back to the subject that seems to suit his temperament: the underworld. Hoping to score at least something in the way of a box office success (it’s unlikely this thing will garner many awards), Scorsese has taken the Hong Kong action hit Infernal Affairs and remade it into his new thriller, The Departed. While it might be cynical to assume that a man like Scorsese is thinking in these terms, his track record suggests that he’s desperate for some traction in the cruel city of Hollywood. Look at his past five features (not including his masterful No Direction Home, made for television): Kundun, Bringing Out the Dead, Gangs of New York, The Aviator, and now this. Not a success in the bunch, critically or financially. With The Departed, an unholy mess of a movie with some of the most indulged and overwrought performances in recent memory, we see a director spinning his wheels, desperately trying to rekindle old magic. And failing miserably.

The Departed is the story of a young cop with a troubled past, one William Costigan, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, Scorsese’s new muse. Costigan is a brooding fellow, whose motivations are never entirely clear: in the course of the film it becomes apparent that he’s brilliant, should be going to law school or Harvard, and is tough, dedicated, and can actually screw the cute chick in the film. Contrast this with Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon). Sullivan has been in the employ of devilish Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), the gang leader upon which whole film hinges. Costello is the film’s bad guy, and Nicholson looks as if he’s having fun, growling and ranting, even wielding a giant purple dildo at one point. His boy, Sullivan, trains to become an elite cop, desperately wishes he were a yuppie and well educated, is a charmer, and finally seduces, but can barely have sex with, the police shrink Madolyn (that’s spelled correctly, thank you), played with dull charm by Vera Farmiga. In fact, at one point it becomes clear that Sully is impotent or a premature ejaculator, we’re never sure except that he’s reassured, post-coitally, that whatever it is happens to a lot of men. So when Madolyn is pregnant, we’re also never certain whose baby is in her toned belly. Along the way it becomes apparent to Vera that her man Sullivan is a rat in the police department; Costigan is an insider within Costello’s group. One has to find the other. The chase is on.

And it could have been a good chase except that Scorsese and scriptwriter William Monahan have it in their heads to be Important. They also seem to think that what made their past movies so good was a confusing plot and barrels of macho humor, most of which, here, falls flat on its face. They should have looked at his best films–like GoodFellas most recently–and determined that their strength lay in startling performances from small actors (like Ray Liotta), swift and economical plots, and simple chemistry. That is enough to create a masterpiece, but here the men decided to fill this bloated flick with a top notch cast that’s weighed down with some of the most hilarious New England accents I’ve heard. From Alec Baldwin to Martin Sheen, this crew seems utterly out of its element, almost ducking as Scorsese’s camera whips around the room. Mark Wahlberg stands out with a performance that veers on embarrassing, and only Ray Winstone emerges unscathed. There are countless tough-guy jokes thrown around, so many that one begins to wonder if that’s all the police department is capable of, flipping off everyone and questioning each other’s manhood.

It used to be that every gesture in a great Scorsese film was fraught with menace. The Departed relies on gunshots and statements of intent to ratchet up the tension, and the result is a seriously tedious work. This is a surprising misstep for the director: The conversations in GoodFellas were almost unbearable for their edginess, and even a scene of a dark hallway was limned with the possibility of violence. Raging Bull seemed ready to blow up at any moment and even his somewhat derided (but wonderful in my mind) After Hours was so frantically insane that one almost had to burst out in nervous laughter just to endure that picture. But The Departed suffers from assumptions and personality: Scorsese appears to believe that Jack Nicholson is enough to make you grip your armrests. Edited haphazardly by the usually sharp Thelma Schoonmaker, it juggles your attention so that moments of conflict fall flat. There is no narrative force to this film as backstory is shoehorned in at inopportune moments, stalling whatever pace Scorsese had tried to achieve. To make matters worse, the plot is also thoroughly baffling. “Where’s the rat?” Costello roars, while the former cop, informant, and obvious suspect Costigan, who is forever text-messaging at key moments (!), is overlooked. Sullivan’s spy in the police force is also forever on his cell, calling his “father” while bewildered special forces officers look around the room wondering where the mole could be hiding. Apparently it is customary for cops and criminals to hold their phones conspicuously at their sides during drug deals, stealing glimpses at the display to make sure contact has been made. In the meantime, Costigan needs to see a shrink, so of course he coincidentally runs into Sullivan’s girlfriend Madolyn. At a the climax, Costigan sends her a disc that implicates Sullivan–to the house they share, with Costigan’s return address (and name!) on the envelope. I guess Sully never checks his mail. And perhaps for the first time, Scorsese gets hung up on a McGuffin, a side story about selling microchips to the Chinese that is of no interest and results in a monumentally silly stand-off between Costello and a pack of Hong Kong thugs. And so on and so forth, until, in a ridiculous climax, everyone is taken down in a way that makes you wonder why the cops didn’t just blow Costello away in the first place.

In better times, Scorsese would have cast Ray Winstone in Nicholson’s role, for Winstone is a man whose gravity seems to pull everyone toward him–he is outstanding in this film, and one really wonders why his character would take any gaff from Nicholson’s Costello. Scorsese also used to excel at giving us the tight society of the underworld: consider the mob’s attempt at saving Ray Liotta’s marriage in GoodFellas. Here, the Irish gangs seem like nothing more than a series of endless cliches and silly brogues. Scorsese is a big man, a player, and he can get his stars to shine bright over a limp screenplay, and ignore the small miracles that made his past films so thrilling… and beautiful. This stretch for credibility is his loss, and ours, too.

…

The Last King of Scotland, 2006. Directed by Kevin McDonald, written by Jeremy Brock. Starring Forest Whitaker, James McAvoy, Kerry Washington, Simon McBurney, David Oyelowo, and Gillian Anderson (and this question: why the hell is Gillian relegated to ten-minute parts while Duchovny gets to write and direct his shit?).

Now showing at the Uptown Theater.

Yet another story of an African nation through the eyes of a white protagonist (see last year’s Constant Gardner), The Last King of Scotland is redeemed through the thrill of watching some very good actors strut their stuff, and a director and screenwriter who realize, for half the movie, that this could simply be a good popcorn flick. Forest Whitaker, who is brilliant, and James McAvoy, who is sexy and fun, carry this often times routine thriller on their shoulders, playing at times like a deadly comic duo.

The Last King of Scotland is the story of a young doctor named Nicholas (McAvoy) who decides to utilize the age-old cliche of spinning a globe in order figure out to where he’s going to escape. A lad from Scotland, freshly educated and bored to tears, desperately wants to abandon his stew-eating family for some foreign action. Well, he finds it, both medically and sexually, in Uganda. Through a strange coincidence, Nicholas meets and befriends the evil Idi Amin, played with titanic moxie by Forest Whitaker. From there our doctor falls deeper and deeper into the madness of the Amin regime, until at last everything he cares for is corrupted. Or killed.

The Last King of Scotland starts out as one hell of a fun ride. With its 70s Ugandan rock filling the soundtrack, and our hero screwing everything in sight and driving like a maniac (not to mention loving the largess he receives at the hands of the Amin administration), Last King appears to have taken the old saw of the white man’s burden and shown it for what it is: a time for whites to either party or exercise their righteous morality on a country that deserves neither. We’re not meant to sympathize too much with McAvoy, who is spot-on as a kid in over his head and loving every minute of it; Whitaker is just amazing as Amin, appearing to have taken his cue from Brando’s Godfather, refusing simply to mimic the dictator, instead choosing to make his character utterly his own, hilarious, real, and terribly frightening.

As a popcorn movie, The Last King of Scotland succeeds for a good hour and a half, until it devolves into the usual uptight hysteria, trying to cram in any number of messages about race and corruption into its often ridiculous finale (where the great soundtrack has been replaced by a hackneyed score). Again, it becomes simply the story of a poor, righteous white guy in Africa, leaving one wondering why his story is more compelling to the filmmakers than, say, Amin’s wife or the Ugandan doctor who saves our hero at the expense of his (the Ugandan doctor’s) life. Finally, our hero gets a Mel Gibson-like comeuppance, and I mean the Gibson of the Christ, not the drunken anti-Semite, and by this time the whole movie has fallen apart. See it, though, for its performances, especially Whitaker’s, and enjoy its entertaining first half.